Just a curious question, why do you use Outlook with a Mac? Is Outlook better than the Apple Mail app? I am new to Mac.
I'm used to using Office and Outlook (on windows, at work). I got MS Office for Mac which includes Outlook to make it easier to share back and forth with work environment. as I recall, I could do more rich text editing, see images embedded in the emails etc more extensively in Outlook for Mac than the native Mac Mail app. and I think that Mac Mail wouldn't let me create personal folders - but I may be remembering it wrong. In any case, things may have evolved over the last few years. so I will check out native Mail to see if it would make sense to switch.
I can say that Office for Mac 2010 completely sucked ! but 2011 version was much better, especially Excel and Word. Even today , there are weird things with Office for Mac 2011, like icon for increasing/decreasing font sizes - the small "A" icon is for increasing font size, and the large "A" icon is for decreasing - wtf !